FeedCity

This interview with Sarah Friar is really good. OpenAI is juggling so many things, I get the impression that it would all fall apart if she wasn’t CFO. She says the new device will be announced later this year:

What Jony and team are really good at is bringing humanity to devices. And I don’t really know how to explain that well, but when you see it, you feel it. […] It feels very natural. But it feels very lovable.

Satya Nadella in the closing to Build:

There are really two stories people can tell about this moment. One is that technology concentrates power, reduces human agency, and leaves to society to absorb the consequences. The other is that we use this next wave to unlock opportunity for developers, scientists, enterprises, and every community. And our job is to make the second story true.

Always interesting when people in power talk about not further concentrating power. I believe he’s sincere, though. I worry more when those with total control over a platform (see: Apple) don’t acknowledge it.

Useful concept, MacWrite was the coral reef for writing on the Mac.

This is my entry for this month’s Bear Blog Carnival, on the topic of staying connected while practicing digital minimalism. Thank you Juni for hosting the Carnival, and for choosing such a fascinating topic! Over the last two years, I have tried to be more intentional about...

I have several ideas swirling around for projects I would like to see happen. Sometimes, these ideas manifest as a project. Wonders of Web Weaving was inspired by my interest in having more discussions about the indie web. Other times, ideas make their way onto this blog to s...

Strong winds at the front of this storm. Lost a branch of the pecan tree. Looks like minimal damage to the roof, mostly just the gutter. Whew. 🌳

The Session existed in a very basic form since the late 1990s. It was just me posting a different tune every week.

But The Session as it is today—a community website where everyone can add tunes—first went online on June 3rd, 2001. That’s 25 years ago today.

Considering the typical lifespan of a web page, I’m proud of having a website still online and thriving a quarter of a century after launching it.

At this point it’s fair to say that thesession.org is my life’s work. Though, really, I’m just the curator; the site would literally be nothing without all the contributions that people have made to it.

It’s been a great 25 years so far, and I’m looking forward to the next 25.

Microsoft announced Project Solara at Build today. They’ve got a couple prototypes, including a clever badge-style device, and thoughts on UI:

We are also investing in just-in-time UI: the ability for an agent experience to adapt across devices and modalities without requiring developers to redesign everything for every new form factor. Today, that means semi-structured approaches like adaptive cards and known content types. Over time, it moves toward more dynamic and generative interfaces.

I enjoyed this blog post by Om Malik about how AI models will become invisible plumbing. Nice history lesson with fiber-optic cables too: A single strand of glass can carry only so much data at one wavelength – think of it as one lane of a highway. Wavelength Division Multi...

Tuesday session in London

Following a report from Bloomberg on Uber, TechCrunch has a post about companies putting a cap on AI spending:

AI is getting expensive, and some companies are cutting back on usage in an attempt to moderate costs. That cohort includes Uber, which recently instituted internal usage caps as a way to cut down on its exorbitant AI spend.

I’m sure this is happening all over. That’s why I commented in my post yesterday that Anthropic’s revenue is not stable. It’s hard to cancel a subscription you value. It’s much easier to cut back on tokens.

🚂

Notes prepared by Claude.ai. It makes mistakes, like where it was recorded, but gets the story remarkably well. A solo Dave Winer podcast, recorded over breakfast in a parking lot in Kingston, NY. The episode starts with something Dave read from Dries Buytaert, the founder ...

This podcast is called MacWrite for the web. A coral reef for writing. I think the pieces are coming. We just need a little Ice-nine.

Working more on Micro.blog 4.0 for Mac. Got a chance to rewrite all the old sidebar code, moving it from a very cluttered XIB to Obj-C code. Now feels more at home with other modern Mac apps.

Getting almost too late to turn this narrative around, but OpenAI tries to make the case for data centers in a new video about Abilene.

Dries: "For an Open Source company, the test is not only what they build for themselves. It is what they help build for everyone."

On Twitter: "I envision a network of twitter-like systems built out of components of the web and nothing more. Every part replaceable."

The only twitter-like system that does text right is Elon Musk's X. I find that somewhat ironic. It's also the only twitter-like system where there's any kind of an actual community. They also have an API that works, has been around for more than a couple of years, and doesn't have a W3C working group messing with it. There's a lot of hype flying around, and we don't have any real journalists covering it so there is no real source of truth. I think the entrepreneurial twitter-likes should stop thinking in terms of owning the web and start adding back the text features the original Twitter thought the web didn't need, over 20 years ago.